It is 11 July 2001. Billy, or rather, the newly dubbed ‘Dr Connolly’, parades around Glasgow University in a splendid academic robe of scarlet and purple silk. Moved by the occasion, I am grateful for the robustness of my waterproof mascara, for I had to fight back tears of pride throughout the ceremony. A strange voice calls from behind us. ‘Dr Connolly?’ We both turn around. Another of the University dignitaries is approaching Billy to congratulate him on receiving the honorary Doctorate of Letters.
‘I had expected you would be much taller!’ she gushes loudly. I move swiftly to intervene as I hear him mutter: ‘And I expected your arse to be much smaller …’
Decorum, academic or otherwise, has never been a feature of Billy’s personal or public behaviour. It is impossible to predict how he will react in any new situation, although he certainly recognizes incongruity when it hits him between the eyes. When Billy started work on the film Blue Money, in 1984, he played a sleazy man with horrible teeth, and was asked to hitchhike along a motorway while a cinematographer filmed his progress from a distant flyover.
Billy thought he would be the last person to score a lift, trudging along in his ragged get-up with an inflatable woman over his shoulder. He called her ‘Olga’, a pink vinyl orifice-bearer draped in a leopard coat. ‘You’ll never believe this, Pamela,’ he exploded. ‘Two trucks actually stopped for me. I had to explain and wave them away.’
The experience somewhat tarnished the ‘rambling man’ fantasy of his folk years, although Travelling Man became the title of Billy’s simultaneous film development project with Ray Cooper for Handmade Films. That movie presented him with a rather different set of challenges, for it never materialized; however, Billy found Ray an inspiring person to be around. Ray is also a musician: a masterful percussionist who performs with Elton John.
In 1983, Billy took me to visit Ray in his modish converted warehouse in east London. George Harrison was sitting in his living room, hungry, so the four of us went for a Chinese meal at a local restaurant. A man from another table approached us while we were eating to ask Billy and me for our autographs, ignoring George. George didn’t seem to care, but we were mortified. ‘He’s a fucking Beatle for God’s sake!’ Billy whispered.
To make matters worse, the man innocently inquired if there was anyone else in the vicinity he should ask for an autograph. Billy saved the day. His social skills are idiosyncratic, but frequently inspired. ‘Well, George here used to play for Manchester United …’ The man still looked blank … ‘and there’s a Chinese waiter over there who used to play for Celtic!’
Billy was thrilled that he was in demand for more movie roles, but he also understood the limitations of the motion-picture medium. He had seen comedy work wonderfully well on film but he also knew that the technical requirements of movie making could sabotage a perfectly hilarious performance. One of Billy’s earliest film comedy successes was in the movie Bullshot. He loved his character, Hawkeye MacGillicuddy, a blind man whose adoration of his former superior officer prevented him from acknowledging that his disability had actually been caused by his incompetent boss.
The story’s irony reminded Billy of the British class structure that so often seems to create emotional ambivalence between groups. He also loved the darkly comic idea that his sightless character didn’t just tiptoe along the road timidly avoiding harm. Rather, he was a contradiction, a blind bully waving around his white stick at the perfect height to cause mayhem, whacking people off their bicycles.
There was a touch of the cartoon character Mr Magoo about him… as well as a touch of Billy’s cousin John.
At one point, Hawkeye is standing in a garden receiving orders barked by his commanding officer: ‘Dismiss!’ Hawkeye snaps to attention, takes a sharp left turn, then marches over a wall and straight into a tree. This particular classic piece of physical comedy has been shown in the United States as a ‘blooper’. ‘I must have been doing something right,’ Billy says nowadays, so pleased with himself. ‘They really thought it was unintentional.’
Billy’s infamous piece of real-life, unintentional comedy was staged on location for his next movie, Water, on the sweltering tropical island of St Lucia. Shortly after Daisy was born, Billy was cast as a ‘singing rebel’ in the film, crafted by the amiable masters of comedy-writing, Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais. In a typical movie-madness scenario, the backing money dropped out just before Billy got on the plane, only to be reinstated just after he arrived. Billy, however, was oblivious to this off-screen drama because he had fallen off the wagon with quite a thud. For months he had been promising himself he would take it easy.
3 April
Jesus I’ll have to stop this self-inflicted punishment. I should never leave home again without a letter from my next of kin, or a note from a priest assuring everyone that I’m unlikely to bite their pets.
He had a proper skinful on the plane to St Lucia. When he got to his hotel, a familiar American man was sitting at the bar. ‘Dennis Dugan?’ Billy recognized him from a television series he’d loved called Richie Brockelman, about a broke detective. The two had a few supplementary bevvies, then joined Michael Caine and other members of the cast and crew to reconnoitre the island for a decent meal.
They had a jolly evening, then travelled back by bus through a part of the island that features steep cliffs on either side of a jungle road. As they careered along, Billy thought it would be a merry wheeze to cover the driver’s eyes with his hands. ‘I’ll guide you.” insisted our drunken control-freak. ‘Left … right … more right …’ It was a game he had apparently played with his London driver: God knows how they managed to survive. Michael Caine apprehended Billy just in time to save the bus from plunging down a bottomless St Lucian ravine.
7 May
I woke up feeling like death. I’ve fucked the issue for myself. Michael Caine had to get me out of trouble, the whole bit. I feel like a real prick.
Michael could see that Billy was in trouble. He spoke to him about his death-wish drinking and Billy took his words to heart. He would try to drink moderately like Michael did. When I arrived at the hotel in St Lucia some days later, carrying a napping Daisy, a gentle, dark-haired woman knelt down to retie one of the straps of my leopard sandals. It was Shakira Caine, Michael’s wife, the most exquisite woman in the world. She looked at me pityingly and I wondered why. Only years later did I hear about Billy’s arrival-night craziness.
Being on St Lucia with a new baby was a challenge for me, for the hotel had no walls. Our room was open to all kinds of elements and, magnificent though it was, huge flying, crawling things presented omnipresent threats. We spent most of the daytime trying to keep Daisy cool beneath a giant mosquito net, then, as the evenings progressed, we lay gazing at the most bewitching night skies we’d ever seen.
In mid-June, when the Water location had moved back to England, Billy drove to Devon late one night to be on set the next day. He was tired. Around 2 a.m., I received a terrible phone call.
‘Mrs Connolly?’
‘No, but that’ll do.’
‘This is the police. I’m afraid Billy has been in an accident …’
My heart stopped.
‘Is he …OK?’
‘We think so … but they’re doing a brain scan … he was knocked unconscious.’
Billy had left the road and somersaulted a few times, totalling his car near Weston-super-Mare. It was very fortunate that he’d not been drunk because the police came to his hospital bedside and breathalyzed him. The following twenty-four hours were agonizingly suspenseful but, mercifully, he regained consciousness.
‘D’you think they’ll let me keep my Advanced Motorist Certificate?’ Billy asked when he came to. He behaved as though he could always get another brain.
20 June
I wish the pain would go away. My eyes look like I should be auditioning for Hammer films, not Handmade.
Billy had sustained considerable physical injuries and his prognosis was uncertain, so the filming had to be put on hold until he recovered. It was remarkable that he’d survived such a colossal impact of metal and tarmac; when I helped him wash his hair, I kept finding little bits of Volkswagen embedded in his scalp.
In true Cochise fashion, he rapidly bounced back to health and, after only one week, he was well enough to attend the soundtrack recording session for Water in George Harrison’s home recording studio. Billy drove nervously up the impressive driveway belonging to Friar Park, the Harrisons’ colossal red-brick, Victorian gâteau, counting no less than nine busy gardeners on the way. The grounds were spectacular. ‘Fuck.’ he said, ‘I don’t feel quite so successful around George.’
Billy has always been fascinated with the behaviour and lifestyles of other well-known people, particularly rock ‘n’ rollers. We had been chuckling about Keith Richards arriving late for a recent dinner party at Langan’s. ‘Keef’ had peered at us painfully from behind his ‘piss-off’ shades and complained, ‘I hate these breakfast do’s!’
Billy was interested to see how many giants of rock ‘n’ roll would appear in time for the official soundtrack recording start at 8.15 a.m. in the studio. In fact, every one of them did: Jon Lord from Deep Purple, Ray Cooper, Ringo Starr and, of course, George. It had not been at all easy for Billy to get up in time. Not even his recent narrow escape had deterred him from further engaging in risky behaviour.
10 July
I feel really bad today. I completely overdid the drinking last night at Peter McDougall’s. I can’t even remember driving home. I once again have huge blank spaces towards the end of the evening. I don’t know how I behaved and I’m frightened to call in case I was over the top or rude or whatever. I wish Pam would call from New York.
I had become a cast member on Saturday Night Live, a famous comedy show on network American television, whose alumni included Eddie Murphy, Chevy Chase and John Belushi. This meant I had to spend a great deal of time in New York. Billy did not want to move there, so the whole family travelled back and forth across the Atlantic over the ensuing seven months. I rented an apartment in Manhattan, in a mysterious ‘Knights of Pythian’ building that resembled a set from Aida.
John Reid began to manage Billy after he turned up on the Saturday Night Live set and offered to manage me. I had a better idea: ‘No. John.’ I replied. ‘You should manage Billy. He needs better management and you two are a great match – you go way back.’
Billy’s contract with Harvey Goldsmith had expired. ‘I’m not planning to re-sign.’ Billy had faced him. ‘In fact I’m going with John Reid.’
‘That’s fine with me,’ Harvey had said. ‘You’re not funny any more.’
Billy had known his new manager since John’s early days selling clothing in Glasgow. Reid had managed Elton John for years and is a highly creative man. At that time he sometimes engaged in a frustrating behaviour Billy referred to as ‘sleeping for Africa’, where he would follow a binge of partying with a period of comatose withdrawal when he couldn’t be reached. ‘I tend to like people who are a bit erratic.’ says Billy, ‘and anyway, I always admired John’s courage and intuitive judgement.’
Pete Brown’s brother, Steve, who already worked for the Reid Organization, became Billy’s day-to-day manager – a gentle Renaissance man who continues to be a respected, insightful voice of calm and reason in Billy’s chaotic professional life. For Steve it continues to be quite a challenge. ‘Billy is full of contradictions,’ he says. ‘He’s the most gregarious person I’ve ever met … he’ll talk to everyone in a restaurant, invite relative strangers backstage and give another hour’s performance while we’re all desperate to go home … yet he barely has a friend in the world and sits alone in his hotel room.
‘He panics in a clothing shop because he can’t bring himself to spend a hundred pounds on a shirt, yet he’ll give away sixty thousand pounds for a local hospice without blinking an eye. He has the worst memory in the world for certain things – I’m terrified of giving him his passport because he’ll lose it – yet mention a song from the sixties and he’ll recite every word.’ Billy has his own rationale for the latter anomaly. ‘I have a drunk memory, and a sober one,’ he explains.
Billy is usually loved by the people with whom he works, but, on occasion, the welder in him returns. When he recorded the television show An Audience with Billy Connolly for London Weekend Television on 3 October, a drunken technician approached him, stinking of peppermint. He pointed to Billy’s Autoharp.
‘We need to hear a level on that thing.’
‘What thing?’ Billy was affronted by the man’s ignorance. He was also very nervous about the show, as many of his famous peers would be in the audience.
‘That thing there.’ Billy thought the man needed an attitude transplant.
‘Well you go away and find out what it’s fucking called and then I’ll consider giving you a level.’ The man never returned.
Billy had asked for a painted backdrop depicting an audience of people who cheered whenever he faced them. It had been provided for him, but in his nervous state he’d forgotten all about it and failed to look round even once. As usual, Billy hadn’t planned a show, but on the spur of the moment he decided to talk about a pharmaceutical product that had recently grabbed his attention: Incontinence Pants. He proceeded to mime the antics of a man with such a problem, getting ready for a night-on-the-town with a seventy-gallon capacity in his trousers. The picture elicited tear-producing howls from the likes of Ringo Starr, Joanna Lumley, Robbie Coltrane and Bill Wyman.
Billy had completely seduced his celebrity audience, prancing around the studio stage beneath his name written in eight-feet-high pink lettering. ‘What a bloody relief,’ he said when it was over.
Cara and Jamie absolutely loved New York and Daisy was the toast of the Rockefeller Center. She was a superb traveller all round, if you discount that one teensy flight when she vomited on Joan Collins. Billy was also quite given to vomiting at the time. His much-quoted stage piece about throwing up ‘diced carrots’ became a reality, for he had adopted my vegetarian-ish diet, more for convenience than for anything else. I found myself hoping Billy would just stay in London, for he had taken to arriving in New York absolutely legless.
11 October
I got thoroughly pissed on the plane on red wine I would normally use to wash the car with and poured into New York like a fucking idiot, proceeding to make a total arse of myself.
12 October
Having thoroughly embarrassed everybody and argued violently and foul-mouthedly with perfectly normal people in a restaurant, I am now, not surprisingly, in the baddest of bad books! I made up my mind today to admit to myself that I can no longer drink.
13 October
Pam and I had a long talk about my behaviour. I had very little to say.
28 October
All my pals were away. I called everyone, Jamie in New York with Pam, Cara in Scotland. It only served to make me lonelier. I wanted to drink, but I fought it and won.
30 October
I proceeded to get merrily pissed.
15 November
Made a total arse of myself. I feel fucking weak and stupid.
24 November
Pam made me breakfast in bed, treatment that surely befits a man who has just turned forty-three. Dear God, forty-three. I must say it’s a real pleasure to have reached such a great stage in the game. I honestly thought I would be dead and gone by this time, but here we are and bloody glad of it.
1 January 1986
I woke, for the first time in my adult life, on New Year’s Day without even a hint of a hangover.
Billy finally quit drinking on 30 December 1985. He has been sober ever since.